KickStarter The Wayward Realms - upcoming Daggerfall-like RPG from original Elder Scrolls developers

[Dwergar]

Here's the plan:

1. Kickstart a "demo".
2. Use the money to screw around for a year.
3. Take whatever random crap they have when the money runs out onto the publisher circuit.
4. Fail to get a deal because their "demo" is crap.
5. Blame the publishers for not recognizing their genius.

Julian will probably take about $100-120K for a year, Ted will cut in about $80-$100K. That would leave about $300K for 12 months of production for a team of about 15 people. Averaging about $20K/y for an individual paycheck.
This would all mean that most of the team will not work on the project full time [Julian and Ted excluded and maybe few others], probably just keep doing what they did up until now [volunteer hours], so putting in about 14h per week,...just this time they will get payed for that amount of [work].

 

[luj1]

The biggest issue is them apparently chasing modernish graphics.

yup

game looks generic, has 0 style

 

[Harthwain]

Here they literally include "equipment" as part of their Choice pillar, as if my ability to flip between shotgun and assault rifle in Soldier of Fortune was a selling point, so then what's so special about how Wayward Realms handles equipment? Does it have faction getups like in New Vegas? Do NPCs react to the condition of your gear like in KCD? They don't say, so call my cynical but all I can conclude at this point is that it's marketing waffle to make commonplace mechanics seem as grander than they actually are.

Don't get me wrong - I am also a skeptic here. That said, remember Indoril armor worn by Ordinators in Morrowind? It was considered to be sacred, so having the player wear it and be seen by Ordinators meant being attacked outright. If they could pull of something similar with equipment, I would very much like that. For example; we don't have enough games featuring cursed items that are powerful but come with certain drawbacks.

You know, I wonder whether this might backfire in the long run, setting up exaggerated expectations like that. Maybe just "Daggerfall with modern graphics" would've been enough to fund this thing without promising some digital blowjobs it can't deliver? Still a challenge, but possibly a more manageable one.

I don't think "Daggerfall with modern graphics" would be convicing enough for a wide-range appeal. Besides, I think their idea could be that's better to make grand albeit unrealistic promises and get funded (and then maybe hope to get attention of a publisher) versus not promising enough and failing to get their Kickstarter funded. They can always apologize for having to make cuts to their Kickstarter backers. It has happened before.

There's no need to convince me.

This is less about trying to convince you and more about showing why at least some of us don't have faith in this project whatsoever.

 

[NecroLord]

Here they literally include "equipment" as part of their Choice pillar, as if my ability to flip between shotgun and assault rifle in Soldier of Fortune was a selling point, so then what's so special about how Wayward Realms handles equipment? Does it have faction getups like in New Vegas? Do NPCs react to the condition of your gear like in KCD? They don't say, so call my cynical but all I can conclude at this point is that it's marketing waffle to make commonplace mechanics seem as grander than they actually are.

Don't get me wrong - I am also a skeptic here. That said, remember Indoril armor worn by Ordinators in Morrowind? It was considered to be sacred, so having the player wear it and be seen by Ordinators meant being attacked outright. If they could pull of something similar with equipment, I would very much like that. For example; we don't have enough games featuring cursed items that are powerful but come with certain drawbacks.

You know, I wonder whether this might backfire in the long run, setting up exaggerated expectations like that. Maybe just "Daggerfall with modern graphics" would've been enough to fund this thing without promising some digital blowjobs it can't deliver? Still a challenge, but possibly a more manageable one.

I don't think "Daggerfall with modern graphics" would be convicing enough for a wide-range appeal. Besides, I think their idea could be that's better to make grand albeit unrealistic promises and get funded (and then maybe hope to get attention of a publisher) versus not promising enough and failing to get their Kickstarter funded. They can always apologize for having to make cuts to their Kickstarter backers. It has happened before.

There's no need to convince me.

This is less about trying to convince you and more about showing why at least some of us don't have faith in this project whatsoever.

Wearing either the Indoril Cuirass or Helmet in front of an Ordinator would result in him attacking you, yeah.

 

[Zombra]

This is less about trying to convince you and more about showing why at least some of us don't have faith in this project whatsoever.

Pretty sure Shog-goth understands that and always has.

 

[Trans-Financial-Man]

Their idea of using Kickstarter to draw investors and publisher is a foolish mistake that will absolutely cripple them. I know investors. I know people at the big publishers. They've been burned financially by backing crowd funded projects before. You can have a massively successful kickstarter if you want. That money doesn't matter because the investors will never see that money in their bank accounts. They invest money into a product with the idea that they will see returns on that. Historically, those crowd funded products they invested in turn out to be mediocre from a team that wouldn't have been funded normally. So publishers and investors lose money for the benefit of an ego project by idiots. Which they don't want to do. Crowd funded products are mud to investors. They don't want them any more.

Investors WILL NOT back this this game to the level these idiots want. At best, they'll get some tepid funding from smaller investors desperate or misinformed enough to avoid the stink of Once Lost. Less then 5 million at most I reckon. Certainly not enough to fully fund the game. They're going to have to do multiple kickstarters with diminishing returns that will result in cut backs on the final game because the people managing this have a delusional and naïve plan.

Oh and that's forgetting that these jokers already embarrassed themselves to Paradox and other publishers and investors. I know from talking to some of these guys. They remember.

Developers for their own good NEED to stop seeing Publishers and investors as free money ATMs they can rely on to "fund" them. You're not getting "funds". You're getting a kind of loan with the understanding you will pay more back than that loan is worth through profit. Investors are businessmen. People with their own goals and desires that may with some convincing align with your own goals. They want to make money. Not lose it. Come to them with the understanding of that, and you are already half way to not screwing them over or getting screwed over yourself. Investors will not be holding the bag when this game flops.

 

[Tyranicon]

Imagine at any point saying that all kickstarters are scams, and then giving funds to people who outright say they'll use your money to look for a publisher.

ROFL.

The games industry is a joke.

 

[notpl]

People do not read what they wrote on the Kickstarter. To their credit, they've been strait forward about all this. They are asking for $500K for one year of development to make a map which is 140km2 and two playable races, orc and human.

Now what does that mean? That 140km2 roughly translates into 11x11km map. It is equivalent of asking money for one year of development to make Betony Island from Daggerfall. It would be sort of playable Alpha proof-of-concept project, which they will take to publishers to get a proper, multi million funding that is needed for the entire project.

This is the biggest thing keeping me from giving a shit about this project. The giant empty space in between points of interest was not what made Daggerfall a good RPG, and it is not something that should be preserved in a spiritual successor. Flat procgen garbage in 2024+ isn't going to be any more interesting than flat procgen garbage was in 1996.

 

[Cohesion]

Imagine at any point saying that all kickstarters are scams, and then giving funds to people who outright say they'll use your money to look for a publisher.

ROFL.

The games industry is a joke.

We have come full circle.

 

[NecroLord]

People do not read what they wrote on the Kickstarter. To their credit, they've been strait forward about all this. They are asking for $500K for one year of development to make a map which is 140km2 and two playable races, orc and human.

Now what does that mean? That 140km2 roughly translates into 11x11km map. It is equivalent of asking money for one year of development to make Betony Island from Daggerfall. It would be sort of playable Alpha proof-of-concept project, which they will take to publishers to get a proper, multi million funding that is needed for the entire project.

This is the biggest thing keeping me from giving a shit about this project. The giant empty space in between points of interest was not what made Daggerfall a good RPG, and it is not something that should be preserved in a spiritual successor. Flat procgen garbage in 2024+ isn't going to be any more interesting than flat procgen garbage was in 1996.

Daggerfall was pretty much a Dungeon Crawler, since most of the action took place in dungeons/abandoned castles and caves.
It was a huge world.
I think it did procedural generation right, but this one eventually got out of style over the years.

 

[scytheavatar]

People do not read what they wrote on the Kickstarter. To their credit, they've been strait forward about all this. They are asking for $500K for one year of development to make a map which is 140km2 and two playable races, orc and human.

Now what does that mean? That 140km2 roughly translates into 11x11km map. It is equivalent of asking money for one year of development to make Betony Island from Daggerfall. It would be sort of playable Alpha proof-of-concept project, which they will take to publishers to get a proper, multi million funding that is needed for the entire project.

This is the biggest thing keeping me from giving a shit about this project. The giant empty space in between points of interest was not what made Daggerfall a good RPG, and it is not something that should be preserved in a spiritual successor. Flat procgen garbage in 2024+ isn't going to be any more interesting than flat procgen garbage was in 1996.

The move from Daggerfall to Morrowind already proven that procgen cannot compete with hand crafted for serious RPGs...... why the fuck you keep having people who want to return to the Daggerfall days, I will never understand.

 

[NecroLord]

People do not read what they wrote on the Kickstarter. To their credit, they've been strait forward about all this. They are asking for $500K for one year of development to make a map which is 140km2 and two playable races, orc and human.

Now what does that mean? That 140km2 roughly translates into 11x11km map. It is equivalent of asking money for one year of development to make Betony Island from Daggerfall. It would be sort of playable Alpha proof-of-concept project, which they will take to publishers to get a proper, multi million funding that is needed for the entire project.

This is the biggest thing keeping me from giving a shit about this project. The giant empty space in between points of interest was not what made Daggerfall a good RPG, and it is not something that should be preserved in a spiritual successor. Flat procgen garbage in 2024+ isn't going to be any more interesting than flat procgen garbage was in 1996.

The move from Daggerfall to Morrowind already proven that procgen cannot compete with hand crafted for serious RPGs...... why the fuck you keep having people who want to return to the Daggerfall days, I will never understand.

The atmosphere, tone and gameplay of Daggerfall, those are its accomplishments.
Not everyone specifically wants to return to its procedural generation.

 

[Lemming42]

why the fuck you keep having people who want to return to the Daggerfall days, I will never understand.

Because the systems have a massive amount of potential that could/should have been built on. The move to Morrowind is disappointing in a lot of ways, not least because MW's handcrafted content is often as dull as procgen content; dungeons are still mostly samey and unsatisfying (only now 90% of them are also trivially small), most NPCs are still placeholders with copypasted dialogue, and quests are still mostly tedious ultra-linear busywork, only now it all takes place in a much smaller worldspace with most of the interesting things (eg crime system, day/night cycle, regional reputations, and other crucial aspects of world reactivity) watered down to the point where they either don't exist or barely exist. The only benefit MW has is the hand-made overworld, but most of it has absolutely jack shit of interest, because the systems are so shallow that nothing means anything, and the "handcrafted" content is mostly so dull that you might as well be playing a procgen game half the time anyway.

It's about the lost potential - TES3 could have been something that refined and expanded upon the possibilities of Daggerfall, but instead it removed most of that potential and watered down much of the rest, and it didn't even make especially good use of the change in direction, producing a template that Bethesda would repeat for two more mostly-disappointing games. After Oblivion and Skyrim, at this point it feels like the entire franchise is a symbol of lost potential.

 

[NecroLord]

I really liked the Special Advantages and Disadvantages system.

 

[ShaggyMoose]

People do not read what they wrote on the Kickstarter. To their credit, they've been strait forward about all this. They are asking for $500K for one year of development to make a map which is 140km2 and two playable races, orc and human.

Now what does that mean? That 140km2 roughly translates into 11x11km map. It is equivalent of asking money for one year of development to make Betony Island from Daggerfall. It would be sort of playable Alpha proof-of-concept project, which they will take to publishers to get a proper, multi million funding that is needed for the entire project.

This is the biggest thing keeping me from giving a shit about this project. The giant empty space in between points of interest was not what made Daggerfall a good RPG, and it is not something that should be preserved in a spiritual successor. Flat procgen garbage in 2024+ isn't going to be any more interesting than flat procgen garbage was in 1996.

It will be interesting to see if that is still the case; procedural generation and AI together I am sure could produce something worthwhile. Probably not to the standard of hand-crafted content admittedly, but certainly an improvement on yesteryear. One way or another, we will be finding out shortly with entire games based on this before long.

 

[NecroLord]

You could use procedural generation on the "filler" dungeons and those that are not really quest important.
Then use handcrafted, unique dungeons for major story quests and the like.

 

[Lemming42]

This is the biggest thing keeping me from giving a shit about this project. The giant empty space in between points of interest was not what made Daggerfall a good RPG, and it is not something that should be preserved in a spiritual successor. Flat procgen garbage in 2024+ isn't going to be any more interesting than flat procgen garbage was in 1996.

The empty space isn't interesting but it's also useful for all kinds of things; timed quests being the obvious one. The player needs to arrange travel and factor in various costs and challenges when moving across the landscape is simulated, to ensure they don't run out of time. It's a big part of the game. If you then were to have things like, say, procgen'd plague outbreaks or war outbreaks, it could make travel even more interesting.

Presumably there's a multitude of ways to populate the overworld. Making something the size of the Iliac Bay is probably over-ambitious but with a smaller world they could hide all kinds of handmade things around the place for people to find, make a road network, and populate the area with things like bandit camps, temples, ruins, etc (impressive work on this has already started in DF Unity). 11kmx11km is probably a decent world size.

You could also do things like have travel networks where carts and ships and things are constantly moving around the worldspace, possibly interacting with settlements (changing their economy and supplying their shops) and bandits (possibly causing supply disruptions) as they go. I don't know if Ted Petersen is interested in stuff like this though, as it might distract from time spent modelling retractable orc foreskins.

 

[scytheavatar]

The move to Morrowind is disappointing in a lot of ways, not least because MW's handcrafted content is often as dull as procgen content; dungeons are still mostly samey and unsatisfying (only now 90% of them are also trivially small), most NPCs are still placeholders with copypasted dialogue, and quests are still mostly tedious ultra-linear busywork, only now it all takes place in a much smaller worldspace with most of the interesting things (eg crime system, day/night cycle, regional reputations, and other crucial aspects of world reactivity) watered down to the point where they either don't exist or barely exist. The only benefit MW has is the hand-made overworld, but most of it has absolutely jack shit of interest, because the systems are so shallow that nothing means anything, and the "handcrafted" content is mostly so dull that you might as well be playing a procgen game half the time anyway.

It's about the lost potential - TES3 could have been something that refined and expanded upon the possibilities of Daggerfall, but instead it removed most of that potential and watered down much of the rest, and it didn't even make especially good use of the change in direction, producing a template that Bethesda would repeat for two more mostly-disappointing games. After Oblivion and Skyrim, at this point it feels like the entire franchise is a symbol of lost potential.

This is just nostalgia talk and a denial of just how bad Daggerfall's procgen content can be. Daggerfall can only dream of having content as "dull" as Morrowind. Also smaller dungeons of Morrowind is an improvement from the Daggerfall dungeons which are WAYYYYYYYYY too big for its own good.

This is the biggest thing keeping me from giving a shit about this project. The giant empty space in between points of interest was not what made Daggerfall a good RPG, and it is not something that should be preserved in a spiritual successor. Flat procgen garbage in 2024+ isn't going to be any more interesting than flat procgen garbage was in 1996.

The empty space isn't interesting but it's also useful for all kinds of things; timed quests being the obvious one. The player needs to arrange travel and factor in various costs and challenges when moving across the landscape is simulated, to ensure they don't run out of time. It's a big part of the game. If you then were to have things like, say, procgen'd plague outbreaks or war outbreaks, it could make travel even more interesting.

Presumably there's a multitude of ways to populate the overworld. Making something the size of the Iliac Bay is probably over-ambitious but with a smaller world they could hide all kinds of handmade things around the place for people to find, make a road network, and populate the area with things like bandit camps, temples, ruins, etc (impressive work on this has already started in DF Unity). 11kmx11km is probably a decent world size.

You could also do things like have travel networks where carts and ships and things are constantly moving around the worldspace, possibly interacting with settlements (changing their economy and supplying their shops) and bandits (possibly causing supply disruptions) as they go. I don't know if Ted Petersen is interested in stuff like this though, as it might distract from time spent modelling retractable orc foreskins.

I feel like the absolute failure of Dragon's Dogma 2 shows that the modern day gamers hate the idea of procgen'd randomness. They want to play games like Elden Ring, which had a lot of bullshit difficult content but the players have the absolute control over when and where to engage those content. Without stuff like timed pressure. They don't want to play games where the control is taken away from them.

It is for this reason that I somehow doubt a modern day Daggerfall will be well received by the modern day audience.

 

[Lemming42]

This is just nostalgia talk

I played DF after MW.

Daggerfall can only dream of having content as "dull" as Morrowind. Also smaller dungeons of Morrowind is an improvement from the Daggerfall dungeons which are WAYYYYYYYYY too big for its own good.

I don't agree; a lot of content in DF and MW is largely comparable. Take quests for example - both games' quests are very linear, typically just a case of walking to a dungeon and killing something/picking something up and then walking back, or even just talking to an NPC in town, only MW gives them to you in the same order with the same details every time, and removes or greatly dumbs down other extenuating factors (travel time, legal status, having to ask around in town which involves your reputation and languages skills, etc). MW isn't a step up; it's the same thing but with half the mechanics missing.

Regarding the dungeons, DF's dungeons may be too large but they also make good use of character build, to the point where you can become trapped if you try to do something outside your skill set (eg leap down a chasm that you don't have the skill to climb, levitate, or teleport back out of). They tend to repeat far too soon and you end up in the same blocks over and over, which is a problem. Meanwhile, MW's dungeons are the same as Oblivion's and Skyrim's, in that they're focused almost entirely on combat and typically so brief and small in scale that they start to become very tedious very quickly because when you've seen one belonging to a certain set - Ancestral Tomb, Cave, Dwemer Ruin - you've more or less seen everything that set has to offer, and the others are all regurgitations of the same idea and same assets and often the same enemies. Again, MW ends up in a situation where it replicates some of the problems of DF (samey dungeons), but in a way that ends up being less interesting and less complex (because they're now too small to get lost in and too straightforward to make interesting use of your character build, especially since half the exploration skills like languages and climbing have been removed).

You suggested that Morrowind demonstrated good use of a handcrafted world; I don't think it did because I think most of its content is hastily made, relatively simplistic, and poor in quality, a feat Bethesda would replicate several more times over the subsequent 21 years. I do think that great handcrafted dungeons obviously beat procgen'd ones, but you were asking why people want the TES series specifically to take more cues from Daggerfall, and that's part of the answer - many people don't view MW, Oblivion and Skyrim as particularly great examples of handcrafted content, so it's not like TES made a quantum leap forward when it moved in that direction. It lost a lot, didn't really gain much, continued to replicate some of the weaknesses of DF but without the strengths, and ultimately led to three games which are all in a constant state of being simultaneously fun for what they are but also really disappointing, none of them seizing on the chance to make full use of their open-world nature or the potential for high quality handmade content.

It is for this reason that I somehow doubt a modern day Daggerfall will be well received by the modern day audience.

This isn't really in doubt; if you offer people an RPG where they can't do everything they want in a single run and where they're punished for attempting things their character doesn't have the skills to do, they get annoyed. Obviously it's not going to enjoy blockbuster success, but I doubt they're imagining that it will.

 

[mindx2]

@scytheavatar said 'I somehow doubt a modern day Daggerfall will be well received by the modern day audience.

Good lord I hope not! If this game is well received by the "modern day audience" I will lose all interest.

 

[NecroLord]

This is just nostalgia talk

I played DF after MW.

Daggerfall can only dream of having content as "dull" as Morrowind. Also smaller dungeons of Morrowind is an improvement from the Daggerfall dungeons which are WAYYYYYYYYY too big for its own good.

I don't agree; a lot of content in DF and MW is largely comparable. Take quests for example - both games' quests are very linear, typically just a case of walking to a dungeon and killing something/picking something up and then walking back, or even just talking to an NPC in town, only MW gives them to you in the same order with the same details every time, and removes or greatly dumbs down other extenuating factors (travel time, legal status, having to ask around in town which involves your reputation and languages skills, etc). MW isn't a step up; it's the same thing but with half the mechanics missing.

Regarding the dungeons, DF's dungeons may be too large but they also make good use of character build, to the point where you can become trapped if you try to do something outside your skill set (eg leap down a chasm that you don't have the skill to climb, levitate, or teleport back out of). They tend to repeat far too soon and you end up in the same blocks over and over, which is a problem. Meanwhile, MW's dungeons are the same as Oblivion's and Skyrim's, in that they're focused almost entirely on combat and typically so brief and small in scale that they start to become very tedious very quickly because when you've seen one belonging to a certain set - Ancestral Tomb, Cave, Dwemer Ruin - you've more or less seen everything that set has to offer, and the others are all regurgitations of the same idea and same assets and often the same enemies. Again, MW ends up in a situation where it replicates some of the problems of DF (samey dungeons), but in a way that ends up being less interesting and less complex (because they're now too small to get lost in and too straightforward to make interesting use of your character build, especially since half the exploration skills like languages and climbing have been removed).

You suggested that Morrowind demonstrated good use of a handcrafted world; I don't think it did because I think most of its content is hastily made, relatively simplistic, and poor in quality, a feat Bethesda would replicate several more times over the subsequent 21 years. I do think that great handcrafted dungeons obviously beat procgen'd ones, but you were asking why people want the TES series specifically to take more cues from Daggerfall, and that's part of the answer - many people don't view MW, Oblivion and Skyrim as particularly great examples of handcrafted content, so it's not like TES made a quantum leap forward when it moved in that direction. It lost a lot, didn't really gain much, continued to replicate some of the weaknesses of DF but without the strengths, and ultimately led to three games which are all in a constant state of being simultaneously fun for what they are but also really disappointing, none of them seizing on the chance to make full use of their open-world nature or the potential for high quality handmade content.

It is for this reason that I somehow doubt a modern day Daggerfall will be well received by the modern day audience.

This isn't really in doubt; if you offer people an RPG where they can't do everything they want in a single run and where they're punished for attempting things their character doesn't have the skills to do, they get annoyed. Obviously it's not going to enjoy blockbuster success, but I doubt they're imagining that it will.

Quests are way more brutal in Daggerfall.
More often than not they are timed (but not punishingly so) and require you to do hours worth of dungeon crawling to get one item, kill a specific character or monster, and so on.

 

[TheKing01]

This will be over a decade long game development, and rest assured - the final buggy, unfinished product will not be anything like what anyone is hoping.

 

[mediocrepoet]

This will be over a decade long game development, and rest assured - the final buggy, unfinished product will not be anything like what anyone is hoping.

You think it's going to get released. lol

 

[Shog-goth]

There is also the horror story brought to us by a survivor who had an inside look as to how these developers operate: How I ALMOST Made the Game of My Dreams

I read the article in question with interest and I must admit that it made me think a lot. In addition, the developers' attitude towards updates on Kickstarter is leaving me very perplexed, as it seems to me that their only interest is to collect as much money as possible (understandable) while providing the minimum (and not even that, in fact) of details on the specific aspects of the game. I can understand that many elements may still be under evaluation and therefore it is preferable not to make statements that may then have to be retracted, but in general I see a very, very low level of involvement on the part of the developers, as if the whole thing only interested them up to a certain point. Maybe I'm wrong and it's just my perception, probably also linked to the climate of great skepticism (fully justified, however) that is breathed here on Codex, but I am seriously considering canceling my pledge if the trend continues in the coming days.

 

[ADL]

They're really botching this opportunity they've been given. Usually Kickstarters keep the momentum going by sharing more stuff and engaging with backers and potential backers. Interviews with press etc. not just post about their bugged campaign rewards and modifications to tiers.

The AI game master is this game's bread and butter. How about showing it off? Julian LeFay said he had it up and running years ago. How about a demonstration? How about a overview on how it works? Instead it seems like he's MIA to such an extent that individuals who have followed the project quite intensely are wondering in what capacity he's still involved.